


Alt-Vos Saga Appendix A: The City of Vos

by Gemma_Inkyboots, raisedbymoogles



Series: Alt-Vos Saga [8]
Category: Transformers Generation One
Genre: Culture, Supplementary Material, Vos - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-17
Updated: 2016-04-17
Packaged: 2018-06-02 18:45:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,070
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6578137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gemma_Inkyboots/pseuds/Gemma_Inkyboots, https://archiveofourown.org/users/raisedbymoogles/pseuds/raisedbymoogles
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Crown of Cybertron, Vos is a complex city of many layers.</p><p>And we're not just talking about the towers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Alt-Vos Saga Appendix A: The City of Vos

Vos lies across the impassable Manganese Mountains from Iacon, which both cities are glad about most days. It is ruled by the Winglord from their eirie at the top of Highcrest Spire, and lately - with 'lately' being the past several million years, as Ephemeris shows no sign of slowing or stepping down - has become increasingly isolationist and downright militant about it. Of course, part of this is thanks to the Iacon Senate's treatment of Starscream...

**Religion**

Vosians don't tend to bother much with Primus Himself. They are more likely to scoff at the idea of any benevolent figure watching over them, mostly because with their Winglord being the way he is, most Vosians don't feel like there are any benevolent figures who might be watching over them. (Unless it's a particularly obnoxious heir-presumptive dropping rocks on the plebs, that is.) Vosians have a spiritual connection to the open sky, the stars and the wind. It might be the whole 'Primus is the planet' aspect that turns them off, because looking down is only a good thing when you're high, high above what might reasonably be considered 'down'.

The Celebration of Lights happens on what other cities call the Trek of the Homeless, when Vosians attach softly-glowing lanterns to their balconies and windows to help lost sparks find their way back to family - before being swept up by the local psychopomp, but that part doesn't tend to get included in the festival. Pretty much any Vosian would look utterly blank on being asked what a psychopomp was, which is just how Threadneedle likes it. They believe in the Well like a floundering shuttle believes in black holes - you're going there whether you like it or not, and until you're actually on your way there, there's no point in worrying about it.

The Vosian equivalent of the Trek of the Awoken is a little more in line with the other city-states' practises, in that it is customary to visit windspeakers to speak to any sparks who might have made the trek to impart a message - only in Vos, the windpseakers don't go to you. You have to brave the wild winds and the most abandoned, precarious parts of the city-state, outside of Vos proper and into the unpredictable winds of the Manganese Mountains beyond, and hope that you can make it up to the windspeakers' lonely perches and back down again. Windspeakers are incredibly sensitive to the Veil, the movement of the wind and the things in between; this makes it nigh-impossible for them to be around large groups of people for long, especially as they get older and more capable, and young windspeakers - while rare - can easily be identified thanks to that sensitivity as they grow up. Helios is an undiscovered windspeaker, but won't stay that way for long.

Vosians respect the Thirteen Ancients instead of Primus, primarily because there's vague but real evidence they once existed, but more because they are convinced that Solus Prime was the first Vosian. There is a spire in Vos named after her, and Vosians - being far away from Iacon's Vector Sigma, which they see as a lesser incarnation of the _Sigma Vector_ , the mathematical name for the part of sparking that mingles donor sparks to create shiny-new individuals instead of carbon-copies of their donators, and grant them brand new Sigma powers - attribute the ability to carry and to create to her.

 

**Spires**

_Bridgeway_ is the entry point of Vos for those who can't fly - Gravitonne once tried to renovate Vos so that any grounders without antigravs couldn't even get that far, but thankfully that plan went nowhere. Bridgeway is combination raucous marketplace and thoroughfare, with accomodation for the traders who visit and the groundframes who ply their trades in Vos. It's getting more difficult these days, with Vos shipping out little and the nobles in the guilds refusing to buy more than they absolutely need, which hobbles the Vosians who actually do the work...

The _Docking Spire_ is just that, the transport hub for all of Vos. It handles goods shipped in and out in bulk, compared to Bridgeway which handles the actual trading of things, and has noticed a substantial decrease in both trade and incoming-and-outgoing passenger shuttles over recent vorns. It's been a long, slow process, but the numbers don't lie, and business is slowing to a crawl.

 _Highcrest_ \- Vosian culture is similar to Iacon's in one way - it's a city of two parts, and that line snaps sharply into place once you cross into the higher echelons of Highcrest Spire. The Winglord and their family occupy the uppermost parts of Highcrest Spire, the highest point in the city of Vos, then lower down are levels for the council debates and hearing of nobles' grievances; please note, only the _nobles'_ grievances are heard before the Winglord. Below that are the levels reserved for the nobility and any visiting dignitaries, though those have fallen off in later vorns. Below that are sections reserved for servants' prep areas and other things that service the higher-ups, and lower still are the quarters for the servants themselves. Below that is what became known as the Exile's Tower, a little offshoot from the main spire that fell into disuse vorns before Nightlight was ousted from the main spire with Dash.

 _Solus Gate_ is dedicated to the one ancient that Vosians actually respect - they insist that Solus Prime, one of the first Thirteen transformers to awaken to sentience, was the first Vosian. Who else could forge a city of such beauty and strength? Who else could forge a people to follow her _inside her own frame?_ Solus Gate is a spire of forges, of molten metal and light, of raw slag processed into steelsilk and steelinen for the artists of Sunrise Gate and the laboratories, schools and medical centres of Farsight. Steelwrights like Radiant live half in Sunrise and half in Solus, learning to work the smaller, neater artist's forges above the blasting heat and mighty waterfalls of molten steel below. If you make it through that, you are worthy of your own studio; most artists never quite leave the forges, though. They're hypnotic, and another reason that Solus is effectively both muse and patron of Vos.

 _Farsight Gate_ is the home of the laboratories, medical centres and the various academies devoted to knowledge and learning. The scientific annuls of Vos are here, and some academics become so engrossed in their work they never truly leave. Sometimes Corona deeply regrets letting Lightspeed anywhere near the place.

 _Onyx Gate_ is twin to Farsight, only this spire contains the good stuff - both lore and philosophy libraries, the entirety of Vos' administration and filing quarters, all the archivists required to maintain the place and their quarters and, oh yes, BOOKBOOKSBOOKS. A copy of every single thing written and produced in Vos is stored there - sometimes without the Winglord's knowledge in the...better secured archives, ahem. The archivists are REALLY dedicated, to their work instead of to the Highest Family, and kind of sneaky.

 _Sunrise Gate_ is the artists' quarter of Vos. The Dance Academy has its own tower, and is one of the gems of Vos - the dancers there regularly perform for the Winglord and family, as well as in front of all of Vos on several different sized stages of differing capacities and levels of Grand. There are levels of rehearsal and practise spaces, as well as dormatories for the dance students, more elaborate spaces for the stars and their teachers, and smaller schools with accomodations fo their own of various other disciplines and sub-disciplines - the Dance Tower alone has silk dancers, pole dancers, aerial troupes, you name it. Dance is a huge industry in Vos, which is a shame because only Vosians tend to be allowed in to watch it. There's also the downside that the Winglord's family and the nobles have enough clout and patronage going on that Dance Tower politics can be a deadly thing, and Skydance wasn't the only one barred from the Tower when he stood up to Starscream. Given that Skydance had nothing but the Dance Tower going for him before he met and trined with Nightlight and otherwise would have been homeless, that was exceptionally cruel. Aside from the Dance Tower, the links to Solus Gate provide materials for smaller forges belonging to blacksmiths, steelwrights and those not into heavy industry as their medium; there are levels of art galleries of all kinds to show off different kinds of art from different kinds of artists that rotate displays contantly, and sometimes depending on the whims of their patrons and whoever had pissed them off lately; concert halls, practise suites, recording studios and musical spaces, though these are smaller than the Dance and Forge schools - along with museums, studios, and more living space and eventually shops that lead into Bridgeway. Artists need to fuel, y'know, even if the snobby ones don't like to admit it and the obsessively dedicated ones kind of forget to.

**Sparkbearers**

Unlike Praxus, where those who can carry sparklings are invited to live and work in the Temple, those who carry for other people in Vos are known as Sparkbearers and, while being fairly respected, have no safety net or support other than what their Guild can provide. They are unaffiliated to any one tower or noble patron, and as such are more stable politically speaking than many of the artist enclaves, but they trade primarily on their collective excellent reputation and can be very fussy over who they grant membership and certification to. Having the title of Sparkbearer means having the Guild behind you if anyone tries to go back on a contract, but the sheer exclusivity of it means that any carriers who can't get membership for whatever reason are kind of stuck on the outside of things. Outside of the higher levels of Vos, the Guild is seen as kind of a noble's stuck-up pretension, and anyone who can carry and wants to for someone else will strike up a non-Guild contract on the quiet - normally between neighbours or friends-of-friends. Shimmersea is one of the luckier ones; she has managed to make a name for herself carrying sparklings for nobility and now has the social mobility to cross the class divide, and she's been able to save enough of a nest egg to stop bearing for others long enough to have little ones of her own and enjoy a break from carrying.

**Trines and Guilds**

Vosians tend to settle down in threes, as either a stable trine with two bonded partners and one, or a working trine where all three are unbonded; or a bonded trine, where all three are bondmates together. Various fads for 'facing have come and gone - in Ephemeris' younger days there was a set of apartments in the eirie for pretty jets playing pet for the Winglord's role as harem master, though that eventually went out of fashion when Ephemeris got tired of it. Eccentricity was never all that enthused anyway, aside from poking at some of the harem mechs to see if they squeaked.

Outside of the Winglord's eirie, the propensity for threes and prime numbers extends to the Guilds and other organisations in Vos; when any particular Guild gets too large, and the definition of 'too large' can be extremely loose depending on the circumstances, the members tend to fracture into smaller groups that begin to work together - either for themselves and the Guild, or against everyone else in it. The facinating and peculiar thing about Vosian infighting is that more often than not, Vosians will turn viciously on any interloper who tries to take advantage of their interfaction bickering and tear the intruder apart. Then they will go right back to squabbling, leaving anything that's left of said invader in a highly confused and bloody heap.

**Political ties**

Vos don't need nobody, so there. Even though their trade routes have kind of shrivelled up and the lower echelons of Vos are starting to get restive, what with the energon shortages affecting them first and not getting enough materials to make things to sell, what of it? The nobles are all right, and the Winglord is more concerned with Iacon's shameful treatment of his preferred great-grandspark. Besides, they're digging down deeper under Vos - they moved up higher as the towers grew taller, and there's always more fuel deeper down.

Right?

...right?

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final Appendix post for now - next week, we start posting Jazz and Prowl's story! :D


End file.
